Prevalence of Wormian (Sutural) Bones in Three Italian Anthropological Collections

Abstract

Wormian or sutural bones vary in number, size, and arrangement in humans, and are thus sometimes described as “odd”. Currently, there are not reliable data to estimate the frequency at which they are found. Some anthropologists have attempted to assess their frequency in different human populations hoping to find whether there are differences among peoples of different genetic lineage. However, the sample sizes in these studies are too small to be able to compare such highly variable structures. A survey of 500 skulls in the Paris Catacombs (les catacombes de Paris) has been previously presented [HAPS, 2018] that reported Wormian bone occurrence in about 85% of skulls examined. This contrasts with most published studies that report incidences in the 10–20% range. These results are compared to a survey of skulls examined in Museo di Anatomia umana Luigi Rolando dell'Università di Torino, Museo di Antropologia, Università degli Studi di Padova, and Museo di Storia Naturale Sezione di Antropologia e Etnologia, Firenze. While all of these represent Europeans, presumably from recent centuries, preliminary results indicate that skulls collected at this period from these regions of Italy have a higher incidence of Wormian bones than has been previously reported for skulls from other parts of the world, and similar to those seen in the Paris Catacombs. Further, the photographic evidence collected in this project may be used to support further research in human anatomical variation. These findings expand the data set for comparison of Wormian bones from different parts of Europe and to peoples from other regions of the world, thus serving the greater community by providing a baseline against which smaller sample groups may be compared.This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.